Liberty Defended The Confederate Contribution

to the original checks and balances with considerable impact on individual rights.
Slavery was nailed into every corner of the Constitution and named unashamedly. Whatever room for argument there was about the accuracy of
William Garrison’s charge that the US. Constitution was a covenant with death this one left little doubt.
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In the events leading up to secession, the
South’s constitutional arguments had been opportunistic about the role of federal government. As Arthur Bestor observed, the South demanded the active protection of the government for slaveowners’ property out of state or in the territories, but made a battering ram of state sovereignty to resist any and all other uses of federal power.
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The Confederate constitution was testimony to the possibility that one can have and eat cake at the same time. It empowered its government to protect slavery, and trussed it up like a turkey from impairing it.
The Confederate constitution actively worked to insure that there were no bridgeheads between central government and the individual which could threaten state sovereignty by giving an individual recourse to anything but the laws and courts of his own state. Take, for example, the relocation of the
Bill of Rights. The first eight amendments are there verbatim, but placed in the section limiting the powers of Congress. Although this was no more than what Madison himself had proposed in 1789, the South’s relocation of it in 1861 made it very clear indeed that it had no relevance to the relationship between an individual and the government, at a time when antislavery groups in the North argued otherwise. Of still greater significance, however,
the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were separated from the rest of the Bill of Rights and reworded as well as relocated in Article 6, the supremacy clause.
Rights were now retained by the people of the several States rather than by the people And powers not delegated to the central government or prohibited to the states were now retained by the states or the people thereof ” rather than by the States or the people A subtle shift it may seem,
but it plainly locked the central government out of the states for the purpose of protecting as well as infringing rights, and just as plainly locked individuals into the states on both counts. Add to this the omission of the general welfare clause from the Preamble to the Constitution, the absence of a stated ambition to make a more perfect Union and the newfound presence of God in it (surely an unconstitutional establishment of religion under the
U.S. Constitution) and there is not much comfort for anybody who did not implicitly trust her liberty in the hands of her home state.
The Confederacy altered even the fragile pathways the US. Constitution built to prevent discrimination against out-of-state citizens who traveled or did business in another state. The clause which gave federal courts jurisdiction of cases between citizens of different states, to ensure impartial adjudication, was omitted. The comity clause, which entitled the citizens of
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each state to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states,
remained, but with an addendum. Citizens were to be entitled to travel to or stay in any state with their slaves without impairment to their property right. What appears to bean afterthought, an extra, is in fact the definition of the clause as far as slaveowners were concerned. It is a codification of

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